Eramet produces first lithium from Centenario plant in Argentina
Eramet becomes the first European company to produce lithium carbonate at an industrial scale.
A plan by Pele Mountain Resources (TSXV:GEM) to mine uranium in northern Ontario while at the same time processing rare earths has fizzled.
The Toronto-based junior said earlier this month that it sold its flagship Eco Ridge uranium property at Elliott Lake, Ontario, to privately-held Enirgi Group. The six-division conglomerate is developing a lithium brine project at the Salar del Rincon in the province of Salta, Argentina.
“Enirgi is commissioning its commercial-scale DXP demonstration plant in Salta, Argentina and is successfully producing lithium carbonate on a daily basis: Rob Scargill, Pele’s interim president and CEO
In an announcement, Pele said Eco Ridge “remains uneconomic and offers limited short or mid-term benefit to shareholders” due to continuing weak uranium and rare earths prices. The project was sold to an arms-length purchaser for $380,000 in cash.
Moreover, the company said it hasn’t been able to generate the necessary support for its monazite processing facility in Elliot Lake. The monazite processing strategy would have involved “[collaborating] with monazite suppliers, technical experts in processing, and rare earth end users to produce separated, high-purity, individual rare earth oxides that have much greater value than mixed rare earth concentrates, and can be used in downstream value added processing and manufacturing,” according to a project page. Eco Ridge, a past-producing uranium mine, produced over 300 million pounds of uranium oxide and is the only mining camp in Canada to have achieved commercial production of rare earth oxides, according to Pele Mountain.
Lithium carbonate being produced at the DXP plant, Enirgi lithium project. Photo courtesy of the company.
Under terms of a letter of intent, Enirgi will own 85% of Pele, in exchange for which Enirgi will provide:
“Enirgi is commissioning its commercial-scale DXP demonstration plant in Salta, Argentina and is successfully producing lithium carbonate on a daily basis. We see excellent potential for Pele to apply this technology in North America and are already investigating opportunities with existing brine resource holders to partner on unlocking lithium production adjacent to Tesla’s Gigafactory,” said Rob Scargill, a mining engineer at Enirgi Group who has been appointed as Pele’s interim president and CEO. Pele’s chairman, Wayne Richardson, is the president and CEO of Enirgi Group. Meanwhile Pele’s current president and CEO, Al Shefsky, has resigned his positions, but will stay on another year during the transition.
Enirgi started building the plant in December 2016 and has ambitions for a 50,000 tonnes per year facility, using proprietary lithium extraction technology, to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate from unconcentrated brine. The company has a definitive feasibility study that outlines 1.2 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent.
2 Comments
Serpentine
I started following the Pele Mountain Eco-Ridge project back in early 2007 (March 2007- Northern Ontario Business article, “Pele has hot Elliot Lake uranium property”) and hoped something would come to fruition but after years of public announcements that seemed to be stuck in feasibility analysis for the most part, I gradually sensed this project was doomed. Add to that, I never could get an email response to my inquiries which was another flag. The word on the street was that it was all smoke and mirrors. Hopefully Pele will take on a new life elsewhere for all those investors.
atopf
A previous version of this story named Enirgi Group as the buyer of Eco Ridge. This was incorrect. Eco Ridge was sold to an un-named, arms-length purchaser. MINING.com apologizes for the error.
Andrew Topf, MINING.com